Scientific Ghostwriting in the Amazon? The Role of Experts in the Lawsuit against Chevron in Ecuador

Abstract

In 2011, lawyers for the Chevron Corporation filed a civil suit against an aqueous geochemist under federal racketeering and corruption laws. They claimed that the geochemist and her colleagues had ghostwritten significant portions of a report attributed to a court-appointed expert in Ecuador, although the accusation was subsequently withdrawn. The original case addressed the environmental impact of Chevron’s operations in lowland Ecuador, the subject of a $9 billion judgment against the oil company. This article treats legal transcripts and depositions as examples of life writing to examine the contribution of experts to environmental litigation. It adds to recent scholarship on the instability of scientific authorship by comparing different forms of ghostwriting. Whereas the pharmaceutical industry employs ghostwriters to conceal the potentially harmful consequences of its products, the scientists contributing to the case against Chevron sought to make the company’s environmental impacts visible. The company undermined confidence in the legal proceedings in Ecuador by criticizing the experts for the plaintiffs rather than their data, preventing people whose lives and livelihoods have been affected by oil contamination from collecting the judgment against Chevron. This corporate strategy may have a chilling effect on the willingness of environmental scientists and other expert witnesses to provide evidence against powerful corporations. There is a need for better accounting of scientific research undertaken in support of environmental litigation, especially given the high stakes of legal contests like this one, in which corporate fortunes, human lives, and the fate of the environment are contingent on their technical expertise.

Social Licence to Operate

“…The trend for social scientists to work with and rely on corporate members' opinions to build a conceptual framework risks producing scholarship that is inherently partisan. The relationships between scholars/researchers (including research, teaching and ideas) and the extractive industry brings much more urgent ethical-political problems to the fore (Kirsch 2022;Murrey & Jackson 2020). At stake here is whose interests the knowledge produced in universities serves, and which perspectives are considered in the building of that knowledge.…”

The small matter of suing Chevron By SuzanaSawyer. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. 416 pp.

“…Sawyer's use of chemical insights as a method works particularly well in assessing competing accounts of the oil spill presented by experts, although it may have led Sawyer to see greater equivalence in the data assembled by the two parties than is warranted, rather than recognizing one side's efforts to make evidence of the oil spill disappear while the other sought to keep it in view (Kirsch, 2020). Sawyer also introduces her own experience of exposure to crude oil, including how its pungent fumes cause one's muscles to contract, eyes to water, and breath to shorten.…”